


Credit for Being Alive

by starsinursa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Coda, Ficlet, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Season 12 finale, Spoilers, season 12 coda, spoilers for season 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 22:38:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11323155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsinursa/pseuds/starsinursa
Summary: Dean is functioning. He’s putting one foot in front of the other. Breathing. Existing. Even if all he’s doing is taking the credit for being alive.





	Credit for Being Alive

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this angsty little coda to help get out some of my emotions, because I am just so full of FEELINGS about Castiel's death in the season 12 finale. *cries*

_'How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.'_ \- Kurt Vonnegut

Dean wonders if this is how Sam felt, walking around sans-soul after being hauled out of the Pit. This numbness, this utter indifference. Like every last one of his emotions had been cauterized at the crackling flames of Castiel’s funeral pyre.

If so, why did he fight so hard to get Sam’s soul back? This isn’t so bad. If anything, it’s almost peaceful. For once, all his feelings of guilt and self-recrimination, the insufficiency, the yearning, the denial, every goddamn feeling that’s ever churned up the bile in his stomach, they’re all just…quiet.

It’s quiet.

He wonders, without much curiosity, if his soul could really be gone. After all, Cas had dragged his soul out of Hell, rebuilt his body and shoved his soul back inside. Maybe it had been ripped away again when the last flickering light in Castiel’s eyes had faded. Maybe somehow, with Cas gone, without that link keeping Dean top-side, maybe his soul had fled right back down like a bat out of - well, _into_ \- Hell. 

If that’s true, he can’t find it within himself to care.

Sam is worried about him. He can feel it in the weight of Sam’s eyes on his back, in the way Sam always opens his mouth to say something but then shuts it at the last moment, pressing his lips together sadly. But he can’t let Sammy talk to him about it, because he can’t take the chance of cracking that wall keeping him severed from his emotions. He doesn’t know why it’s there now, after all the shit he’s been through over the years, or what’ll happen if it goes away again, but he knows it won’t be good, and so he avoids Sam and doesn’t even try to look behind the wall.

Besides, there’s nothing Sam can say when Dean isn’t out slumming it at the bars, or trying to make demon deals, or recklessly endangering himself on hunts. Hell, he isn’t even drinking. There’s no need. He always drank to numb the pain, and now, there’s nothing. No pain. Just a yawning hole like he’d been shot through with the grenade launcher, punched open like the wall of the bunker, messy guts and emotions just crumbling away with the mortar and brickwork. So Sammy can’t say shit, because Dean is functioning. He’s putting one foot in front of the other. Breathing. Existing. Even if all he’s doing is taking the credit for being alive.

It works, too. For a while. It works until the day he stumbles across Cas’ trenchcoat, folded up in one of his dresser drawers. Numb to sentiment, it had been mere force of habit to keep it - he always kept it, he couldn’t let it burn. Even finding the trenchcoat now doesn’t phase him, doesn’t stir any echoes in that empty space in his chest. It’s just a coat.  


He slides the material through his fingers, smooths over the collar. His heart-rate doesn’t change. His eyes are dry.

But when his fingers glide across the punctured hole in the back of the coat, accidentally, suddenly fumbling with shock -

\- then, like a dam bursting, he breaks.


End file.
